Harry Styles: give every child a chance to go to school

Harry Styles has added his distinctive voice to calls for universal education.

The One Direction star has explained to fans that he wants to live in a world where every child can go to school.

In a YouTube video posted on his Twitter account, he adds: “I really loved my school days.

“When we went to Ghana we met children whose only dream was to get an education. At the moment they have to work all day every day just to earn enough to eat. Going to school could literally change their lives. For now, all they can look forward to is a life of struggle and they deserve so much more.”

The video is part of the Action/1D movement which calls on fans of One Direction to share photos and videos about a subject that is close to their hearts. These will then feed into the Action/2015 campaign, an umbrella group of more than 1,950 organisations that are fighting climate change, poverty and inequality.

The group has formed to lobby world leaders at the UN summits that will be held later this year to set post-2015 goals on development. Universal primary education by 2015 was one of the Millennium Development Goals set in 2000. Although great progress has been made, the goal was missed, with an estimated 58 million children still out of school.

Styles is not the only celebrity to get involved in the education world. Earlier this year, Taylor Swift announced she would be giving the profits of her single Welcome to New York to the city’s public schools. Colombian pop star Shakira has founded a charity that works with underprivileged children and Dolly Parton has set up an Imagination Library which distributes millions of free books annually.

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